Meeeeeeme

[sholio]

Okay, I need something kind of mindless for a rainy morning. This is a meme that went around ages ago, and I don't remember doing it at the time, but why not? I think I'm adapting it slightly from the original, but it's been years.

Name a TV show, movie, book, comic, etc, that you're pretty sure I haven't watched/read (or at least not more than an episode or two), and I'll tell you what I think it's about.

Comments

[veleda_k]

Revolutionary Girl Utena. (I have no idea if you've watched that one or not.)

[sholio]

I have not! Oh wow, you picked one I know NOTHING about, too. Everything I know about it, I've picked up from a couple of icons (well, a couple of icons I think are from the show), so I guess I have a general impression that there are women and swordfighting and canon f/f in it somewhere. I suppose I have it filed under "generally CLAMP-like" in my head (or it might actually be CLAMP?) but, uh, yeah. Women, swords, fantasy. And I think there's a character with long pink hair, but I might be mixing it up with something else.

[ratcreature]

Jeremiah (the tv series, not the comic).

[sholio]

I thought for a few seconds that I knew more than I did, then realized I was thinking of Jonah Hex. Yeah, no. I'm actually not sure about this one -- I'm not even sure what genre it is. Just going off the name and maybe some vaguely half-buried memory I would guess that it's an action show with supernatural elements, but that's just a guess.

[ratcreature]

Heh no, wrong genre. It's SF, but not of the aliens & technobabble kind. It's a post-apocalyptic story, in which a plague killed all adults a few years earlier, but children and teenagers survived, and are now rebuilding (obviously traumatized and with much knowledge lost but they manage in interesting ways). Some adults survived in a bunker and there is a backstory arc relating to that and to the reasons for the plague, but it's mostly human drama and worldbuilding. There is interesting stuff with religions and spirituality the survivors developed to make sense of of the catastrophe, for example. It's written by JMS (though very vaguely inspired by the Belgian comic) so the myth arc is not nonsensical either. Unfortunately it got canceled after just two seasons.

[sholio]

Oh my - that sounds really good! Shame it was cancelled; I think I might have to check it out. :D

[ratcreature]

You should. It never really gained fandom traction (and the pairing I like best, Jeremiah/Kurdy, i.e. the protagonist and his sidekick is even rarer, probably because Kurdy is black and that never helps a slash pairing, unfortunately, so the fandom latched on shipping other combinations), but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

[attackfish]

TV show, Brimstone, from the 90s

[sholio]

This sounds very VERY vaguely familiar, and I swear there is some more information on this show hovering somewhere on the tip of my brain, but all I'm coming up with is that it's something to do with demons? Or with *a* demon in the human world? Possibly that is completely wrong.

[attackfish]

Cop kills his wife's rapist in 1985, dies, and goes to hell. in 1997, there's a mass breakout of hell, and 113 souls escape. The devil sends our intrepid cop to round them up, promising to bring him back to life and give him another shot at heaven if he succeeds. To do this, he has what he had on him when he died, grubby sweats, his gun, which never runs out of bullets (actually magically in show never runs out of bullets, which is nice, because usually the ordinary gun just somehow never runs out in fiction) and $36.27, which refills daily and functions as his salary. The show was canceled after thirteen episodes, because Fox didn't advertise it and kept screwing with it's time slot, which was a shame, because it was just starting to get going, and his wife was starting to get suspicious about seeing someone who looks a whole lot like her dead husband wandering around. Also, it's a really imaginative envisioning of the Christian mythos that along with having genuinely good people go to hell (and not just our cop) along with some spectacularly awful ones, but also posits that God basically committed a hostile takeover of the universe back about 5000 years ago and killed off the pagan gods, and oh by the way, that's the ultimate goal of the soul who led the breakout of hell, to kill off this god. Plus, the main villain is a woman, and about half the souls are women, and a lot of them are people of color.

And it's never ever going to get a DVD release.

[sholio]

That sounds really interesting and fun! ... and of course there's next to none of it, and I'll never see it. Blast.

[mackiedockie]

Book: The Instrumentality of Mankind, by Cordwainer Smith.

[sholio]

I've never heard of the book, but based on what I've read of Cordwainer Smith (i.e. some of his short stories) my guess would be that it's very odd and kind of nonlinear and full of interesting ideas.

[mackiedockie]

Pretty good guess :) Cordwainer Smith was so far ahead of his time that he's still ahead of the curve. The Instrumentality is a compendium of stories set in his Instrumentality universe. And I should have checked the MARC record of the book in my library before I posted, because I got the title wrong--the compendium that puts the short stories in order is called The Rediscovery of Man. The novel, Norstrilia, is still a cracking good read, too.

[magibrain]

Life On Mars?

(I can never tell if the things I come up with for these memes are too well-known for people not to have watched/read/etc them, or too obscure for people to have heard of them.)

[sholio]

Watched it! See icon. :)

And I know what you mean. Trying to do this meme on other people's journals ... it is HARD to come up with something that's not just ridiculously obscure, but that they likely haven't seen.

Wanna try again?

[magibrain]

Haha. Sure! ...after I review your icons. :P

...Bones?

[sholio]

Well, I've never watched it, so that's a good one. :D The main thing I know about Bones is that I often get it confused with Castle ... another show I've never watched. I think it has something to do with both shows having a male-female leading pair who look kinda similar and each including a dark-haired guy who was in a cult-famous genre show. Remembering which is which is hella hard for me.

So ... Bones ... it's a crime drama, and it's based on a series of books, I think? (or maybe that's Castle). And the main female character (named Bones) is kinda badass and smart -- and the main guy is called Booth, I think, and he's played by David Boreanaz, which I might be misspelling. And the couple has UST for a few seasons and then gets together, and maybe she gets pregnant? ... or maybe that's Castle. AARGH.

[magibrain]

That sounds like Bones! It was based on a series of books about a forensic anthropologist, and the main characters are Dr. Temperance Brennan (who gets called "Bones" a lot, and who interests me because she seems like she could be a nontraditional portrayal of someone on the autistic/aspergers spectrum; she doesn't *get* a lot of social cues and such, and is very comfortable within her own area of expertise, but is also attractive and facile with her language and such) and FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth (who's cantankerous and snappish but portrayed as a good guy, if a little overprotective and very defensive). They solve murders and other deaths by examining subtle evidence left on the bones of the deceased, and Booth and Bones have UST until they hook up and Bones gets pregnant.

And one of the scientists working for the Jeffersonian is Jack Hodgins, who seems like he's never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like. Also, it takes place in Washington, DC. So I feel like I should have a crossover idea with White Collar, given the FBI/conspiracy/DC connections, but so far I haven't come up with one.